The most moving memoir I’ve read in year recent years is Emily Bernard’s Black is the Body: Stories From My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine. I’m re-reading the book this week in anticipation of Bernard’s visit to the Sanborn Library tomorrow evening, May 19.
The book covers a range of experiences and includes an essay, “Scar Tissue” about a knife attack that took place in a New Haven coffee shop in the mid-nineties. It was a random attack by a mentally ill man. Bernard was among the seven victims. But here’s the thing about this book: In essay after essay, Bernard refuses the easy story with an obvious moral in favor of a far more complex, subtle examination. For instance, as she recounts the story of that night she reserves anger not for the knife wielder but for a callous surgeon who, while probing her wound and causing great pain, wouldn’t tell her what he was doing.
I gasped and instinctively grabbed his hand. It was only then that the man looked at me, and said, icily, “Don’t. Touch. My. Hand.” His eyes were Aryan-blue and cold as his voice. I asked questions about what was happening and he refused to respond. Only the attending nurses treated me with any kindness or respect. Whenever I tell the story of the night I got stabbed, I always say that the person who did the most injury to me, who left the deepest wounds, was not Daniel Silva, but the surgeon.
I wanted to reach into the book and throttle this asshole. They should teach “Scar Tissue” in medical school. And the book moves on to other difficult subjects, including how, as an African-American Professor at UVM, Bernard approaches teaching difficult issues of race in classes that, often, don’t include any students of color. Here, again, Bernard’s nuanced and unexpected take is thought-provoking and piercingly honest. A student asks how it feels to hear a certain revolting word repeated as part of a class discussion.
I have an answer ready.
“I don’t enjoy hearing it. But I don’t think that I feel more offended by it than you do. What I mean is, I don’t think I have a special place inside of me that the word touches because I am black.” We are both human beings, I am trying to say. She nods her head, seemingly satisfied. Even inspired, I hope.
I am lying of course.
And the book moves on…to the challenges and comedy of marriage, to the tribulations of adoption (Bernard and her husband adopted two girls from Ethiopia), to Bernard’s childhood growing up in Tennessee. “In Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Bernard writes, “the main character shares with her best friend a few things she has found out about life over the years.” The same might be said of Bernard and the way she opens up to a reader on the page. Not much more I could ask of any book.
Peter Orner is a novelist, story writer, and essayist—as well director of Creative Writing at Dartmouth. He's written two novels, three short story collections, and his essay collection, Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Before moving to the region he was acting chair of the MFA writing program at San Francisco State. He's a former member of the Bolinas, CA Volunteer Fire Department and a current member of the Norwich VFD.